Reality
by SupremeMasterOverlordKhurro
Summary: Slav was not always as "crazy" as he is now. After Shiro triggers a self defense mechanism from Slav that causes him to go comatose, a member of The Blade of Marmora explains to the team that Slav was not always how he is now and reminds Shiro that isn't the only former prisoner of war on this ship. **PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE**


**I just really love Slav and don't think he gets enough love. And then this idea came into my head.**

 **This takes place between the Escape from Beta Traz and the season finale.**

 **Also, since there is so little about Slav's species, I'm just gonna say they have fur. Smooth, like a Boxer or a Pitbull's fur.**

It was no new fact that Shiro had very little patience when it came to Slav. The genius weasel thing was quirky to say the least and hard to deal with. As if his superstitious personality wasn't bad enough, he was constantly talking about other realities, complaining about the lack of modern technology, and enacting compulsions that Shiro simply couldn't understand. And somethings, things can get out of hand and overflow.

Currently, the team was trying to help Slav build a new weapon. Or at least they thought it was a weapon. No one was really sure, and couldn't get a clear answer out of him.

"That isn't how it goes! The red one can not touch the green one, it causes horrible explosions in 7 other realities!" The paranoid weasel shooed Hunk's hands away, and Hunk put his hands up in surrender, though his patience was clearly wearing thin.

"What about this reality?"

"Red wires can not touch green wires. The red one goes with the blue one, that will increase chance of this working by 34 percent!" Slav tied the wires together, because scrambling over to the other side to adjust some more wires.

"What if the blue wire touches the green?" Lance asked from where he sat on the floor, a tangle of wires in front of him. "In this reality."

Slav glared over the machine at him. "Red wires can not touch any other wires."

"Yeah, but I asked about blue and green." Lance gave him a droll stare.

"Blue are green can touch, but can not connect. Otherwise, we lose 4 percent of our chances of this working."

Lance didn't reply, but continued working. Really, his only job was untangle the wires. Pidge was the closest to him, connecting wires and monitoring things. What exactly they were building, the others didn't know. Only Slav.

Slav glanced over at what Shiro was working on, and gasped. "No, no don't let that wire touch that, it will ruin our chances of survival by 70 percent!"

"In what reality!?" Shiro snapped at him as Slav hurried over to pull the wire away from the little metal chip.

"Eight!"

"What about _this_ one?!"

"It might be one of the eig-"

"MIGHT?!" Shiro threw his hands in his air, the metal arm powering up and glowing as it fed off his frustration. He would never actually strike him, but the reaction he got was not what he expected. Slav froze, the hair on the top of his head and running down his back bristling and his tail puffing up like a cat, eyes clenching shut. And he didn't move. His whole body went stiff, and Shiro lowered his arms, looking startled. Everyone else waited for a noise or a movement from Slav, but there was none.

"Uh...Slav?" Shiro went to poke his shoulder but a gloved hand blocked his way.

"Don't touch him. The bristled fur will cut you hand." The Blade of Marmora member, Garlos, said.

"What's wrong with him? This isn't the time for a nap." Keith crossed his arms.

"It's a self defensive mechanism. He will be fine in about an hour." Garlos explained. He turned to Shiro. "You seem to forget that you are not the only one on this ship was a prisoner of this war. Slav was imprisoned much longer than you were. Your imprisonment was for their entertainment. It did not matter if you liked them, as long as you fought. And you fought in their ring, they cleaned your more dangerous wounds, and you were allowed some time to rest. Slav was prisoner only for his intelligence. And believe it or not, he was not always as he is now." By now, Garlos had the attention of everyone else in the room; Shiro, Keith, Lance, Hunk, Pidge, and Allura. Coran was somewhere else on the ship, busy doing who knows what.

"What was he like before this?" Pidge asked. "And how would you know?"

"Because I've worked with him before. Before I can tell you about his past, I should make some things clear about his species. Not only are they very advanced inventors, but many are also seers. Slav's ramblings of other realities are not made up. A few were very fierce fighters, using their ability to solidify their fur into spikes and armor to their advantage."

"I remember that." Shiro realized. "In the gladiator ring there was someone who looked like Slav. Bigger, and tan instead of the grayish-green that Slav is. I got out before I would've had to fight him, but I saw him fight. He didn't wear as much as Slav, but the fur on his back would stand up in spikes all the way down to his tail, while the rest of his fur would stay flat. No weapons could get through the fur."

Garlos nodded. "It's very hard to break through their fur when they're fighting or feel threatened. It can be done if the same spot in struck enough or hard enough, but for the most part, it is like a shell. When relaxed, they're smooth and rather soft. Since they can't really bite, they rely on highly advanced weapons or their spikes for defense."

He glanced down at Slav, who was still in the frozen four antennae things that grew from his chin had flattened against his chin.

"While I didn't know him before the war, I know he had been part of his planet's military and rather high ranking at that. While he was not a fighter in it, his job was to design new weapons and new technology to keep them advancing and ahead of the Olkari. His kind was always in a kind of cold war with the Olkari, before the Galra attacked. When the Galra began conquering the other planets, his kind and the Olkari signed a truce and turned their attention to the Garla. But when Slav's planet was attacked, the Olkari never went to help them. Slav escaped and the Blade of Marmora, then just a small rag-tag group of rebels, found him and he agreed to help us on the condition that we help him." Garlos paused, looking a little unsure. His fuzzy purple ears were tilted back nervously.

"Slav...he had a mate. And three kits. The Galra empire had taken them prisoner, and he was desperate to get them back."

"Whoa, hold up. _Slav_ has a family? Wife and kids? And that was when the Galra first _began_ to attack?" Lance interrupted.

"Had. I'll get to it. And yes. His species ages even slower than the Galra." Garlos waved off the questions before continuing his story. "Anyway, he promised to help us if we help him. So we tried. He was working on disguising our base, and we were working on hacking the Empire's computers, but they found us. Slav was captured. He fought them the whole way, you wouldn't even recognize him if you saw him back then. Eventually, about 7 years later, he managed to escape back to us. At first, he was skittish and a little off. But then he shook it off and went right back to work, designing most of our technology, our suits, and even our blade designs. We kept searching for his family. That's how it went for several years. He was captured and escaped several times, but each time it took him longer and longer to recover. Finally, he finished the plan for our base and with a little bit of help, built it. And a year later, we found out the location of his family.

I went with him that day, along with a few others. We were going to break them out, cause as much damage to the prison as possible. But they knew we were coming. When we got there, Slav's family was tied up and gagged, and the youngest kit was being held up by his tail with a Galra blade at it's throat. We shouldn't have taken Slav with us into that prison, but we did. And we were ambushed and held there. Slav was handcuffed and wrapped tightly, and forced to watch up close as each one of his kits was tortured and killed, and then his mate was tortured and killed as well. They separated us after that, but for the few years I was in the prison, I heard what they were doing to him. They knew he was a genius, so they needed a way to break him, to make him listen to them…"

 _~~Flashback, 7000 years ago, Slav's POV_

At first, he had given up. Why keep trying, his family was gone. Brutally murdered in front of him. He could still hear the kits crying, still feel their blood splattering his face. But then he remember the Blade of Marmora, they still needed him. He still had a chance to get vengeance. His whole planet had been destroyed by the Galra, his family, most of his species. Was he was the last one now? He didn't know. So he began to fight it. He could go into the comatose defensive state, knowing they would cut their hands on his spikes. He couldn't bite because the shape of his mouth, but he could refuse to eat. He would not give them the information they wanted! He would not build weapons for them!

But the Galra were smart. Zarkon wouldn't take no for an answer. So they started doing other things. They would hook Slav up to machines, and flash pictures past his mind. His people burning, his planet gone, his family, his friends, the Blade of Marmora gone, a universe completely ruled by the Galra. The witch, Haggar, worked her evil magic on him. There were no breaks it seemed. For hours upon hours, they would show him these scenarios -or maybe they were alternate realities?

He would fall asleep and be haunted by the images. Haggar began to talk to him. Slav had been a prisoner before, several times, but never had he met Haggar in person. An Altean, a living one? What reality was this? Her words were confusing. He couldn't understand them.

When was the last time he ate?

Slept?

But wait, here comes the doctors again. Electric shock therapy today, they had told him. It had hurt. He had never experienced such pain before. He wasn't sure when it knocked him out, but when he came back around, Haggar was there. She was talking again, about some kits and a mate? Alteans didn't have kits, they had kids.

Haggar told him he was sick. She said it was his seer abilities, they were all over the place. It wasn't a very common illness in his species, but it happened sometimes. Why would she lie to him? She always rubbed that spot behind his ear that he loved, he could trust her. She would bring him back to the right reality.

She gave him some medicine. Some pill he had to swallow. It tasted gross.

And the doctors were back again. The ones with the sparky sticks. He didn't want the pain again. But it came.

One day, he woke up leaning over a desk with the designs for some space ship. Why? He guessed it didn't matter, the universe was at peace right now, right? He continued to design it.

More sparks. More pain. Hallucinations? No, that was reality, right? He knew those faces from somewhere…

 _Present time, Garlos talking._

"They had designed Beta Traz soon after they caught him that last time. They walked him past my cell during the transfer. He was laying on a table, mumbling to himself incoherently and his eyes...they looked so far away. I didn't see or hear of him again until I escaped and got back to the Marmora headquarters. Because of Slav's escape record, they made the high security prison Beta Traz just for him. He designed it, apparently. Along with Zarkon's ship. Thace got the rest of the information. Haggar and several other scientists put Slav through some pretty severe psychological torture. It was the only way to control him and make him build weapons for the empire. Eventually, he forgot about what happened to his planet, forgot about the beginning of the Blade of Marmora, and even forgot about his family. If you mention any of it, he'll tell you that happened in a different reality, not this one. Or may deny it entirely. The electric shock therapy combined with whatever drugs it was that they gave him that made him hallucinate the way he did messed with his seer abilities. Somehow, they managed to damage every part of his mind except for his skill in building and designing weapons." Garlos sighed, looking again at Slav. This time, he moved his hand over to brush over the spikes. The ends of the fur bent down.

"And they damaged this too." He pulled his hand away, though his glove was now torn. "The spikes should not fold down like that. It wouldn't surprize me if the drugs they gave him caused this to weaken as well."

Garlos looked back up at Shiro, giving him a stern look. "You are not the only one on this ship to have been a prisoner, Champion. You were just rescued sooner than the rest of us."

Shiro looked down, mentally cursing himself for not realizing it sooner.

When the hour had passed, Slav stirred, blinking a few times as his fur flattened and his chin antennae relaxed back to their normal place. He looked confused at first, as if not remembering where he was or what was going on. Shiro went to step forward, but Slav glared at him.

"No, all of you get away from my machine! Useless humans, you'll just mess it up and ruin our chances of survival! Shoo!" He shooed them away with all eight hands, and Shiro backed up. "I will finish it on my own! Go!"

No one argued and they would be lying to say they weren't a little relieved to not have to work with him on this project anymore. Just because they knew why he was the way he is, that didn't change the fact that his constant chattering about realities and percentages wouldn't get a little irritating.

Shiro did however glance back as he got to the doorway. Slav was already bent over this new invention of his, twisting wires together and a look of heavy concentration on his face. All eight hands were working in 4 individual pairs, and his tail was waving ever-so-slightly behind him. Shiro tried to imagine the Slav that Garlos had described, the one who had a family, who was a high rank in his planet's military, who had fought to stay free. It was hard to see. Shiro had been a prisoner for a year, forced to fight in the Gladiator ring and he had foolishly thought it was one of the worst things a prisoner could go through. But Slav had gone through 7000 years of psychological torture. The fact that he had survived for so long despite everything, the fact that he was still willing to make weapons that would help people he didn't even know, despite the fact that his own planet and family were gone -even if he didn't believe it was in this reality- made Shiro ashamed of how he had treated Slav. He would try to be better from now on. He would try to be more understanding, more patient. Slav had literally lost everything, even if he didn't remember.


End file.
